A collection of tech problems I've come across and what fixed them.

Category Archives: Problem Fixes

I had a few Cisco 3502e access points that I needed to deploy temporarily and came across one that wouldn’t join the wireless LAN controller. After the AP powered up the status LED would flash green, then red, then off, and then repeat. The “Getting Started Guide for Cisco 3500 Series Access Points” on Cisco’s website said that this meant “Discovery/join process in progress”. I’d not seen that happen to any of the other identical AP’s I’d just worked on, and after letting it sit there a while I determined that it wasn’t going to sort itself out.

After a few seconds the AP will again attempt to reach out and find a WLAN controller, and this time it’ll connect successfully and determine if any code updates need installing before joining the controller.

I’ve got some computers that I want to do some warranty lookups on, and Lenovo’s warranty lookup site requires the seven character Machine Type code along with the serial number when lookup up info for their “Think” branded products. The serial numbers I had. The machine type, notsomuch.

Not liking the idea of having to go visit each of these machines across 7 buildings, I started looking for WMI commands that would hopefully get me what I needed. I came across this page on Lenovo’s website, and that ended up being the last piece of the puzzle. The example WMI commands they give are run locally on the computer, but can be ran remotely with an additional argument. Here’s one of those examples, but with the additional argument for remote use:

wmic /node:"hostname" csproduct list full

The result gives you the serial number, machine type, model, and a couple other odds and ends. Just what I needed!

Need to install OSX Mavericks from a USB drive? The methods used for older versions of OSX no longer work, but Lifehacker has a great set up instructions for getting this done for OSX Mavericks. Check it out:

A MacBook Pro came across my desk that needed to be set up for a new user. That means a re-installation (or recovery, or restoration…whatever) of OSX. I wouldn’t want to get a “new” laptop to find someone else’s junk all over it, so I assume no one else does either. At any rate, Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac is installed and of course the product key is nowhere to be found. Even with that in hand, calling Microsoft to try to talk them into giving me another activation for that key was not something I really wanted to have to deal with.

In my case, the license wasn’t moving to a different computer; I just needed a way to keep my already-activated license on a MBP that needed a re-install of OSX. The steps described at the site above worked great!

If you use Google Chrome exclusively, then that’s the end of things. If you still use Internet Explorer, however, then you’ll get a warning thrown in your face when you click on a mailto: link that mentions IE’s “Protected Mode” and if you want to allow the specified program to open.

This TechNet blog post details exactly what’s happening and why, and most importantly, how to work around it. After following these steps I can now click on mailto: links in IE and have Google Chrome open a new email composition window without any prompts to deal with. Tidy!

This page over at IT Ninja has the link to Adobe’s site for the full, offline installer for Shockwave 12 as well as the instructions for building a transforms file to install it silently, all in one place. A big time saver for me today after getting the run-around on Adobe’s site.

When trying to install Exchange 2010 SP3 UR1, I was given an “Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 3 Update Rollup 1 Ended Prematurely” error message. Turns out UAC is getting in the way of the installer. By running the installer from an elevated command line, you can install the update with no problems. Here’s a page that shows you what to do. It’s written for Service Pack 2, but it also applies here: